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Camino 2.0.4 addresses critical security vulnerabilities

The Camino Project developers have released version 2.0.4 of their open source web browser for Mac, addressing several critical security vulnerabilities. The Camino Project is almost as old as Firefox and like Firefox, uses the Gecko rendering engine. The main difference is that the user interface is based on Cocoa instead of on XUL, tailoring Camino exclusively to the Mac operating system.

The 2.0.4 stable release of Mozilla's Mac browser upgrades the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine to version 1.9.0.19 2010081818, which includes several stability fixes and closes a number of critical security issues. However, specific details about the vulnerabilities were not provided. Other changes include print settings fixes for Mac OS X 10.6, improved ad-blocking and updates for the “Block flash animations” code and bundled Java Embedding Plugin.

The update also works around a bug in Flash 10.1 that could cause the browser to crash when invoking Exposé while a Flash video is playing in full-screen mode. The developers urge all users to upgrade to the latest release.

Camino is one of the few Mac browsers that still support both Intel and PowerPC-based Macs – also known as a universal binary application. According to a mailing list posting by Firefox development director Mike Beltzner, it looks likely that, based on the number of PPC users running Firefox, the next major release of the web browser – version 4.0 – will not in fact support PowerPC Mac systems. Beltzner notes that the developers "do have tests running on PPC, but nobody seems to be looking at them".

Update (31-08-10): The Opera developers have announced that they will also be dropping support for the PowerPC architecture. According to Opera Developer Daniel Aleksandersen, only 0.1% of the company's users still use PowerPC based systems and Opera 10.6x will be the last release with support for the processor technology.

More details about the Camino release can be found in the release notes. Camino 2.0.4 available to download (direct download) for Mac OS X 10.4 or later from the project's site. Camino is released under the MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-license.